@bt
In the thread, it mentions that you were only planning to press 300 copies. Let me encourage you to press 500 instead, if the number is not already locked in, so that the need for pressed CDs can be filled. If financing is an issue, then perhaps people would be interested in purchasing 2 copies for $25-35? I know that I would. If you were to promote that sales of Meteor Blaster DX would be helping Xymati to be developed for TurboGrafx/PC Engine, then I'm sure that a lot more interest would be drummed up. I would love to see Xymati finished up for the PC Engine!
I chose the 300 number based on the amount of interest that I have received over the past few months. It is somewhat of a gamble, the money I spent on the CDs could have gone for the (required) business expenses that will arise with Xymati. True, I could have gone for the 500 quantity for another $100 or so, but it took the better part of 8 years to sell off the first 500. I just don't have the storage space for a couple hundred extra CDs to be sitting around for that long.
Think of it this way, with supply and demand, you get your copy now, it will be worth a whole lot more in 4 years than had I gone for 500, and still had some available.
For a PCE version of Xymati to happen, a lot of things would need to happen, not only in the game code, but also in the community. The reason I chose to go with the PC market was for 2 main reasons. 1) Number of PCs that could run the game (compare this with the number of PCEs out there); 2) the things I wanted to do in Xy were over burdening the poor Duo's CPU and memory, and this was with only a limited amount of in game stuff there (no weapons yet).
I am not saying it cannot happen, but a game this size takes a lot of time, and the PCE development takes 2-3 times as long as PC development, I am lucky if I get 2 hours a day of non stop "extra curricular" coding time.
In addition to the PC audience, very little effort is needed to move a XNA based PC game to the Xbox; further, all I would need to do is port the dX code to OpenGL and I could have a version that runs on the PS3 and Vita too. That is a tremendous audience for less effort that a scratch made PCE version; and version that will not be able to have all the features I have in the current PC version.
Please keep in mind that everything beyond this line is speculative:
If the MB re-print shows that there is interest in the PCE scene still, then there is a game or two sitting on the back burner ready to come out (well, it's not ready, but ready to begin development on), and depending on how that does, that would certainly have some bearing on the PCE version of Xymati.
Now, ideally, I can take the game engine that the PC version of Xymati uses (MSL4) to quickly create other games (just need the digital assets and virtually any sort of 2D game can be made very easily), so if Xymati is successful, or I can get someone to license MSL4, then that would allow me to focus more time on the game making which would give more time for PCE ports, rather than releasing sadistic games like Loop v2.
